Creation Myth

bella rotker

––After “I Know the End” by Phoebe Bridgers

Some say chaos precedes all creation. The mythological void state which predates the beginning of the universe. In German legend, chaos is ubiquitous––a battle between a cultural deity and a chaos monster. In Christian theology, chaos refers to the abyss formed in the separation of heaven and earth.

You were three when you were first put in a leotard and sent off to a dance class. You went to the local dance shop with your mom and bought a pink leotard with a bedazzled skirt sewn in. No one explained why the skirt had to be sewn in, but it did. You bought pink tights and didn't open them until you got home. When you opened the seal, they looked doll-sized. You went back to the store and bought another pair of tights, XXL this time. The clerk asked if you were sure, and your mom said yes. When you got home, you put the tights on and screamed until your face turned purple because the fabric pooled around your ankles and you hated the seams on your toes. When you returned the XXL pair, the clerk said something about how she knew you were going to do that and about how those tights streeetch. When you pulled on the first pair, you realized they fit perfectly, then threw another tantrum because the seams still hurt your toes. You cut the feet off your tights for the next three years until the assistant at the studio introduced you to footless tights.

Your first pair of pointe shoes was a pair of Bloch Hannas. You were ten, but the studio owner didn’t care and let you go up anyway. You permanently damaged your foot bones that year, then switched studios and went back down.

Your first winter at a boarding school in a place with real seasons, you run out of class and spin in the thinly falling snow. Forever, you yell at your friend, I could do this forever.

You were never the best girl in class. You gripped the bar too tightly, alignment slightly forward and to the left. You had no poker face; your face would turn cherry-red, blood-red, when your thighs shook during frappes. The Vaganova technique had its specified hierarchy of dancers as outlined by talent, body type, and socioeconomic privilege. Ballet was never meant to be fair. The girls with three inch thick arches and leg lines pulled up to the ribs you could count during a balance got placed at the middle of the center barre. The closer to the end of the U-shaped setup of the barre, the worse a dancer was as compared to the rest of her classmates. You were second to the end of the center barre, barely hanging on to being good. The girl at the very center of the barre had the same name as you and was two feet shorter. She killed a Russian shoe a week. Always Grishkos or Russian Pointes.

You know that your hometown is remembered for its glamor. For Miami Vice and cartels and tequila, but you never got that. You got public school, the park across the street where all your friends lost their virginities, Ballet teachers yelling in Spanglish, spending hurricane season curled up inside praying the sandbags will hold, praying the water will not creep underneath the
marley in the studio.

The divine twins are horsemen gods or demigods. Rescuers, healers.

You went to your first dance competition when you turned seven. You rehearsed five hours a week for three months and borrowed one of the director’s pretty costumes. The dance was inspired by a European folktale, but you don’t remember which one. When you got on stage and they announced your name, you stared directly into the lights until almost blind. You forgot the part of the choreography with the big jumps and stared straight at the judges for a full eight count. Took your bow and rushed into the wings to cry. Cried over your lunch of blueberry pancakes at the diner across the street. Cried when you won high gold out of pity.

During our first week at your new studio, your director sat you on the floor in front of the royal blue couch in the common room and wrangled your hair into a bun. When you showed up the next day with your hair down, she had the other teacher’s daughter do your bun. She told you that dancers must always wear their hair up. A two-strand “cinnamon bun” for students, or a french-twist for company girls who always wanted to look longer and thinner and more ghost-like. Balanchine girls wore a balanchine bun, but we were better than that. We were Russian-trained. Like the military has their camo, she said, like a quarterback has his jersey, a dancer has her bun. A week later the studio offered a tutorial before class to teach your level how to do your own buns, now that you were big kids. The teacher’s son sat in a corner with a tub of hair gel, shaping his blonde hair into different kinds of spikes and mohawks.

Despite your twelve years of Vaganova training, you spent your final year dancing at a Balanchine studio. Thought if you could get an in at the Miami City Ballet, your dance career might stand a chance. The girls at the MCB schools, they were famously bad––no one had ever bothered to teach them proper technique, how to stretch their feet to build and strengthen their arches. They spent hours doing just about nothing in those white beach-side studios with twenty-foot high ceilings because their teachers were always called to all-company, or principal rehearsals. You were better than that, at least, but you were two inches shorter than the standard MCB hire, and heavier than the other girls. You hated the Balanchine technique, never got the point of stylized spotting. Your teachers could never get the rigidity of the Russian technique out of your system. Chest forward, your new teachers would say, hold a biscuit between your forefinger and your thumb, just out of reach so you can’t eat it. Let hunger fuel you. Dance like you’ll never move again.

The ballet mistress at the last studio you danced at was Karen, a woman who enrolled her unvaccinated children at the local Waldorf school. She talked a lot about her “Head, Heart, and Hands” teaching strategy, which meant she was willing to poke you there using a ruler if she felt your alignment wasn’t good enough. You got poked a lot more than the other girls.

No one seems to want to stay in Miami. They come for high rises on the beach, art deco at sundown like all the coffee table books about the city that raised you. They realize it isn’t here and go north. Often, you worry that you were one of these people: you took what you wanted and left.

The first time you passed out you were thirteen in a Giselle rehearsal. You don’t remember much but you remember the feeling of your face turning ghost white, and an unbearable heat. Then you hit the ground. The music did not stop. The other girls did not come to you and place cool hands on your forehead. You stood back up and kept dancing. After rehearsal, the artistic director told you it meant you were getting skinny, pretty. You were getting a head start.

Everybody loves to talk. Everybody knows your life is a constant state of tragedy. Or at least, you know if you believe that it is, the real sorrows are easier to swallow. If everyone talks about the last time you cried in the parking lot outside the dance store, they’re not talking about what the doctors said that made you cry. You let yourself become a kind of folklore, an urban legend.

Karen came into all-company one day hysterically sobbing because her son told her he didn’t want to keep doing ballet. He appeared in that December’s production of the Nutcracker anyway. You learn to hate the winter. When the snow comes, you wear a thin jacket and tell yourself it’s just late summer. Eventually, the cold becomes undeniable. Your converse will be traded out for boots and you will once again have to confer with the fact that you’re not home anymore. Do you blame boarding school for taking dance away, or just your illness? Would you have left Miami if not for getting sick?

In earth diver myths, a supreme being sends a creature, usually a bird, to find sand or mud with which to build habitable land. In these stories, beginnings emanate from the depths.

Your roommate the first few months at school was a dance major. You felt like it was a calling from the universe, a signal you were unsure how to interpret. You were so jealous of her even though she spent the entire semester watching class because she had broken her foot. If only I had gotten that spot, you thought. You didn’t go see her in the Nutcracker that December because you still couldn’t think about dance without sobbing.

You have dreams in which Miami is just another suburb. Is not modern art and Michelin stars but teenagers in the park, Spanish spoken in classrooms. Not nightlife but new dialects.

The first doctor’s appointment in which you are told something is seriously wrong with you happened early. You were young, still loved dance. We don’t know what it is, they said, but it’s not good.

They say Miami will be underwater in five years’ time. Parts of it already are. Let the city become a kind of urban legend even when it no longer exists.

You liked to believe that if you’d ever have to stop dancing you would put up the fight of a lifetime. I don’t know who I am without it, you’d say, I’m in too deep to give up now. When you were left with no option but to leave, you thought, what a waste. You still don’t really know who you are without being told your worth by a ballet master.

Your blood will never fully be scrubbed out of the marley of old studios. You kept all your tutus, too expensive and ornate just to throw away, but you haven’t looked at them in years. Your last pair of pointe shoes is still sitting in your closet, waiting to be sewn.

The first time you are cut open, it’s shoulder to shoulder. A bilateral abscess excision, the doctors explain. They plan to dissect the infectious parts of you and hope it will help. They carve until they find a clear margin, then pray it does not come back.

In emergence myths, humanity emerges from the womb of the earth mother. The process of creation is that of birth. Male characters rarely figure into these stories.

You grow up understanding the studio to be a kind of church. You do not speak inside one unless you are teaching. You learn to use your movement as a form of communication. A pointe shoe is the closest thing a girl can get to holiness, wholeness. As you get older, you are made responsible for making the little girls that look up to you love ballet as much as you are supposed to. If you curve your port de bras at a perfect 170 degrees, the Ballet 1 girls will want to be you. If you dance in the wings at the Nutcracker because the little mice can’t remember your choreography, somewhere in their three-minute dance number they will understand discipline, authority, a lens through which to view the world. They will understand that you were once like them.

You read about creation myths in public school from second grade to freshman year, when you leave for boarding school. Every so often, you hear from friends that they still read about them in English class.

You knew you had to stop dancing when trying to translate your notes from your ballet history class to movement. In your notes, you had scribbled something about how ballet was the movement of nobility. Originally a random Spanish-originated series of movements until King Louis XIV of France established the first dance notation and ballet school. Dance, though, had always been around. Dance was how humans kept stories alive, as though they had a heart, beating right inside your hand when you moved the way they did. Dance documented the original creation myths. You took a pique turn, then a hard fall. You are alone in the studio. No one helped you up.

You learn quickly that Michigan loves Michigan. You wonder what there is to love besides the water which isn’t an ocean, the ice that doesn’t thaw for months, the churches on every street corner inside which no one is singing or dancing. It doesn’t rain in Michigan. The sky just turns gray and suddenly everything around you is water.

Your first round of tests happens in late August, three weeks before the new semester at boarding school is due to start. A new cardiologist adorned you with monitors. Like a child under watch, he draped the wires beneath your arm, taped them to the ribcage. Said, thirty days, or, as long as you can stand it.

You don’t miss dancing. Taking off pointe shoes to see trickles of your own blood at the end of the box, satin ribbon holding tight to your ankles, being so sore you can’t walk for days, weeks, but you do start to miss having something, anything, to do but rot in bed and conference over the phone with new doctors.Your first self-choreographed solo was also the last time you danced by yourself onstage.

Ex nihilo, or out of nothing: matter is not eternal but created from a divine act. Unlike other creation myths, it is in opposition to Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from nothing. In this way, it is uniquely theistic. Concept from contrast.

All the Vaganova studios are light pink when you’re a student. Moving across the floor, pointe shoes slipped on without toe pads so you could feel your pedigree through the black marley, spotting the picture of Miss Vaganova hung high on the wall, you could feel your lineage. Chin up, Miss Mazzarelli would call at you, pull up, lace your ribs together. You were next in a line of principal dancers who had trained and bled in the same room.

You leave Miami the same year you stop dancing. You tell old mentors, pas de deux partners that boarding school is time-demanding and you have new priorities. You do not tell them about the doctor that sat you down and said that ballet was destroying your body. The week you made the decision to move, you hand-wrote a letter to your mentor who had invested everything in you. You printed pictures of the two of you teaching the baby ballet classes together in the envelope. You didn’t tell her anything about sickness. You said I’ve gotten all I can from ballet, it wasn’t meant to be. You said I’m handing down my spot at the barre.

World parent myths describe the eternal union of primeval entities. Creation occurs in the separation of the forever.

Your body still carries all the marks of a dancer. You wear custom insoles to keep your arches from collapsing, you have matching scars on your inner ankles from never being able to tie your ribbons properly. One of your calves is still smaller than the other from having sprained your ankle in a reproduction of Serenade––you spent that whole summer in PT but the boot had already ruined your leg. Your hips and knees still pop when you stand up after sitting in class. You explain it all away as part of your illness. The connective tissues, you explain, were damaged when I was younger.

The doctors make their final guess about your condition eighteen months after you stop dancing. The snow falls in your hair and collects on your shoulders, sending shocks of nerve pain up your arms where the surgeons cut muscle away from bone. They recited a litany of acronyms at you but all you heard was there is no chance you will dance again. You understand this as the kind of grief only sick girls know: your life as you knew it before only exists to you.

Often, you are asked if you feel like a traitor for leaving dance. Michigan took it all away, you say, and it’s true. You resent yourself for running away from the problem. You resent the midwest as a symbol of what you have lost. You haven’t spoken Spanish in years. It’s all just a story from your past, a fun fact none of your new friends seem to believe is true. There is never any talk of disease, of homesickness for hot miami studios, just here is another thing that was taken away.

The last time you set foot in a studio was late summer in Connecticut, four weeks before you moved to Michigan. The studio was empty, floors still slick with sweat from the Advanced Level C class that took place just before. Glass panes stretched the length of the floor to the ceiling, where big black curtains were drawn back and held in place with a thick ribbon. The last verse of some Phoebe Bridgers song rang through your tinny phone speaker and your knees dropped to the ground. A bobby pin loosened from your french twist. The director of the summer program walked in silently, touched your shoulder as you kissed the scuffed marley. The weight of what you both knew hung between you like thirty two fouettes: the last time a pointe shoe is worn before being thrown out.

Bella Rotker studies at Interlochen Arts Academy. Their work appears in JAKE, Full Mood Mag, Fifth Wheel Press, The Lumiere Review, Neologism, and Best American High School Writing, among others. When she’s not writing or fighting the patriarchy, Bella’s hanging out with friends, watching the lakes, and looking for birds.